More than 70 people died in the attack on Monday.
Advertisement
Residents light candles to honour victims of the blast in Quetta during a candelight vigil in Peshawar.
The blast struck outside a hospital in the city of Quetta, the capital of volatile south-western Balochistan province, Police official Kashif Shabir said.
Police rope off the hospital after blast, on Monday evening Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Army Chief General Raheel Sharif paying visits to the wounded. Foreign reporters are routinely barred from visiting, and local journalists in the province have been killed or intimidated in great numbers, according to human rights groups.
Relatives and residents offer funeral prayers for a news cameraman killed in Quetta’s suicide blast on August 8, 2016.
QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) – Pakistani lawyers are mourning colleagues slain in a shocking suicide bombing the previous day in the southwestern city of Quetta that killed 70 people, mostly lawyers. Radical Islamist militants view lawyers as closely linked to the government in Pakistan.
“Lawyers throughout the country will boycott court proceedings on Tuesday in protest against the killing of lawyers in Quetta on Monday”, said a statement from the Pakistan Bar Council, adding that provincial and district bar councils would follow suit.
The Pakistani Taleban faction that claimed the attack, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), was formed in 2014. Pakistan deployed extra police units outside court building. This is not the first time either that a hospital has been attacked in Quetta after victim/s from an earlier attack were brought there.
But analysts have warned the group is still able to carry out major attacks.
Another lawyer, Rehmatullah Khan, said he was missing his friends and colleagues.
Schools, universities and businesses in the province also were closed Tuesday.
“The people are justified in asking where were our security agencies when these actors, foreign or Pakistani, were plotting or causing mayhem in Quetta”.
A suicide bomber detonated his explosives’ vest amid the gathering, and survivors later described scenes of panic as the blast ripped through the emergency room.
It was also unknown who was behind the killing of the lawyer, Bilal Kasi, who was gunned down on his way to court earlier in the day.
Advertisement
The motive behind the attack was unclear and no group had yet claimed responsibility, but several lawyers have been targeted during a recent spate of killings in Quetta. However, if ISIS was behind the attack, it would be the first manifestation of their presence in the country.
